The Museum had four new additions to it's collections on display. It seems that another curator had found four 12 lbr Mountain Howitzer tubes (Barrels) chained together at an Eastern Naval Yard in storage. They were grouped with a collection of cannon tubes labelled " Civil War Cannon ". The other curator had noticed that two of the tubes that he could see had had engraved on them their histories "Vera Cruz," etc. ending with "Mexico City" "1947". As they were in the posession of the Navy, Steve Allie, director of the Frontier Army Museum, could only go look at them which he did and by feel discerned that the other two, together with those that had been seen, were also engraved similarly. The paperwork getting them from the Navy to the Army was such that they had been expected around the first of last year but, have just arrived. Only four Mountain Howitzer pieces were taken into Mexico at Vera Cruz in 1847 during the Mexican War. They were part of the ordinance battery with the Army that had marched in and took Mexico City. One of these tubes was part of the piece hauled up into a bell tower and fired by a young lieutenant named U.S. Grant. He later was an officer in the Civil War and was General of the Union Armies at it's end. Becoming....the eighteenth President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Back to Table of Contents Penny Whistle #40 Back to Penny Whistle List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Lion's Den Publications. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com